America Has The Fastest Supercomputers In The World

We are often surprised by the speed of the latest computer or smartphone, but the supercomputers that do the world's craziest calculations will always put our dinky consumer electronics to shame.

These supercomputers are incredibly powerful. They are made up of giant mainframes linking tens of thousands of processors to achieve incredible computing speeds, measured in petaflops. One petaflop equals 1 quadrillion calculations per second. For comparison, that's more than 12,000 times faster than a MacBook Pro.

The Titan supercomputer, housed at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee reached a speed of 17.59 petaflops to knock another American supercomputer, Sequoia, out of the top spot to No. 2.